Bedtime story – A tale of two vRA admins

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

My six-year-old asked me to tell him a bedtime story and it went something like this.

Jimmy and Tommy are both vRA admins. Jimmy works for a large financial company and Tommy works for a large company that makes really cool stuff. Both Jimmy and Tommy made great decisions to use vRA to automate their private clouds. Jimmy decided his organization was going to build all their own integrations. Tommy decided to use the SovLabs plugin for all his organizations needs.

Four weeks after Tommy’s vRA deployment his company was using vRA to deploy 75% of their virtual deployments. Meanwhile after four weeks Jimmy is just getting started designing the first of many needed integrations. Fast forward a year and Tommy’s organization is now deploying 100% of their workloads. They have reduced management overhead by 45%, and are able to deploy new server requests in under an hour.

A year later Jimmy’s company is still working out bugs with their custom code. Their administrative overhead is up 55% and it still takes over two-weeks for new server requests to be fulfilled. Jimmy is working 80+ hours a week and perpetually stressed. Tommy on the other hand is working 30 hours a week, but don’t tell his boss. He is enjoying his job and has next to no stress.

I then ask my six-year-old who he would rather be Jimmy or Tommy? He responded neither daddy I would rather be you. I asked him why he said he wanted to be me. He responded, because daddy you helped Tommy only have to work 30 hours a week.